Digital Charity…

I’ve written on several occasions about my “love-hate” relationship with technology with, what I feel anyways, a pretty acute focus on the “hate” part.

This sentiment has been prevalent for last few years, mostly because I’m trying to find my place in this great big world. It’s caused me to question all the ones and zeroes that have enveloped my life and my actions. But, that topic is for another post for another time and it’s not what I want to talk about now. The point that I was meandering towards is that I’ve been wanting to do something digitally for the world. Nothing big, just something on the smallest scale I could think of, that directly involved me, was my creation and was something that could help people out in some way. Without any hope or expectation of reciprocation.

After looking at time, responsibilities and demands I settled on video as my building material for all of this.

I’ve been making video tutorials for my WordPress clients and family for about a year now and they’ve been well received. At first it was a very time consuming process but once I got a workflow down and thoroughly learned the vid capture software I was using, I was able reduce that creation time to something way more manageable. In fact, I spend way more time rendering/compressing the video then I do actually creating them. Which is a good. So once I could accomplish this task in under an hour I got the idea that I should start making support videos for EVERYONE on this crazy planet of ours.

So I did…

At first, this process took me way out my comfort zone. I was on camera, in motion, my voice was there, I’m imparting information, I’m telling strangers what to do, it’s all very, very “not me”.

But after the first couple videos went live, I breathed, forgot about them and moved on. After I realized I wasn’t going to quit doing this (and started getting traffic to the initial channel I setup) I started realizing that this could be a really amazing science experiment utilizing the web that could help a lot more people than I currently was.

So I then challenged myself to see how many more people I could reach around the world. I opened accounts on as many social networking platforms that I could think of, cross posted all the videos I’ve made on them and I simply sat and waited.

The initial stats that came in were a trickle. I was psyched when I got my first 100 views! But as this project got more and more inertia I started reaching the same amount of folks in less than 24 hours. Then I started seeing stats of where in the world people were hitting my videos (all over the globe) and it wasn’t long before I found myself interacting with folks, (I chatted with a guy Saudi Arabia last week). Some of the interaction has been more questions, or critiques, or spam, but for the most part, it’s been a simple “Thank You!” .

And that was the target I was aiming for. To simply help folks. Mission accomplished.

So where do I go from here? Well, the project continues to grow faster each month. In fact, it got big enough to have it’s own home which I finally launched last week. Go check it out if you’d like, it’s at http://www.simplewordpresshelp.com .

I hope it continues to grow, but, if it doesn’t, if it fizzles out, I won’t be bummed. I already achieved what I set out to do. I dropped that pebble in the pond and seeing where those ripples reached has been incredibly rewarding.